Australian telecommunications service provider, Telstra, is showing how industry frontrunners are accelerating their move to 5G to secure lucrative new business potential and demonstrating innovative new use cases along the way.

Technology is enabling new opportunities and use cases every day, and operators are speeding up their journey to 5G to ensure they have the network capacity, quality and new functionality required to grab the attractive business opportunities of the years to come.

According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, by 2023 we expect to see an eightfold increase in mobile data traffic, 8 billion mobile broadband subscriptions and 1.8 billion cellular IoT devices in the world. A growth like this will be challenging for today’s networks worldwide to cope with.

To support more usage, more people, more things, and more business combined with the ever-increasing performance requirements, Telstra, the telecommunications service provider in Australia, has accelerated their move to 5G and Ericsson has been there to support its strategic partner in yet another groundbreaking milestone for the country.

An Australian-first center for 5G innovations

Last February, Telstra opened its 5G Innovation Centre at the Telstra Southport exchange on Queensland’s Gold Coast. The center, inaugurated as a home for testing the next generation of mobile technologies in Australian conditions and to support the early commercial deployment of 5G, has been a tremendous statement of Telstra’s technology leadership. Only one month later, two new use cases were launched at the center:

The world’s first precinct of 5G-enabled Wi-Fi hotspots, which allows Gold Coast locals and visitors to enjoy free broadband. Since there are no user devices yet that could support 5G, Ericsson is using this technology as a powerful backhaul connection for the hotspots. Users can then connect to fast speeds using the all-familiar Wi-Fi.

5G Connected Car. Though still in its early stages, it is already achieving download speeds close to 1Gbps inside the car and while on the move. The vehicle is also equipped with a Wi-Fi access point.

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